“Left!” The erect, tense figure confronting him staggered back a step as though a heavy blow had fallen upon it, and Mrs. Romayne caught desperately at the back of a chair. “Left—and you don’t know where she is? You’ve settled nothing? We’ve no hold over her!”
The words had come from her in hoarse, gasping sentences, each one growing in intensity until the last vibrated with an agony of very despair, but Falconer’s face grew grimmer as he listened. How it was he could not have told, but a strange, uncomfortable remembrance of the girl he had seen on the previous day, which had haunted him at more or less inopportune moments ever since, seemed to rise now and accentuate all his usual antagonism to the woman who was talking of her.
“I think you need not distress yourself,” he said stiffly. “Perhaps I had better tell you at once that your son knows no more of her whereabouts than we do.”
The drawn look of despair relaxed on Mrs. Romayne’s face; relaxed into an agony of questioning doubt.
“Doesn’t know?” she said sharply. “Julian doesn’t know?”
“The landlady of the house,” continued Falconer, “a very unpleasant and loquacious woman, was eager to inform me that on the arrival of your son yesterday afternoon, about an hour after I saw the young woman, there was a quarrel between them and that he left the house in anger. To-day, very shortly before my arrival, he returned and was astonished to find that the young woman was gone. He demanded her address, and was furious to find that it was not known. I think there is no room for doubt that the young woman has left him!”
The colour was coming back to Mrs. Romayne’s face slowly and in burning patches, and her clutch on the chair was almost convulsive.
“Left him!” she said under her breath. “Left him!” There was a moment’s pause, and then she said in a harsh, high-pitched, concentrated tone: “Do you mean—for good? Why? Why should she?”
“I am sorry to have to say it to you,” said Falconer slowly, “but I fear the case against your son is even blacker than it appears on the surface. I think it more than possible that he deceived the young woman.”
The slowly-formed conviction—and it became conviction only as he spoke the words—was the result of that vague and disturbing impression made on Falconer on the preceding day by “the young woman.” It had worked slowly and almost without consciousness on his part, but it had refused to die out, and it had attained the only fruition possible to it in his last words.